ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST
THE EGYPTIANS
=The Land of Egypt.=--Egypt is only the valley of the Nile, a narrow
strip of fertile soil stretching along both banks of the stream and
shut in by mountains on either side, somewhat over 700[6] miles in
length and 15 in width. Where the hills fall away, the Delta begins, a
vast plain cut by the arms of the Nile and by canals. As Herodotus
says, Egypt is wholly the gift of the Nile.
=The Nile.=--Every year at the summer solstice the Nile, swollen by
the melted snows of Abyssinia, overflows the parched soil of Egypt. It
rises to a height of twenty-six or twenty-seven feet, sometimes even
to thirty-three feet.[7] The whole country becomes a lake from which
the villages, built on eminences, emerge like little islands. The
water recedes in September; by December it has returned to its proper
channel. Everywhere has been left a fertile, alluvial bed which serves
the purpose of fertilization. On the softened earth the peasant sows
his crop with almost no labor. The Nile, then, brings both water and
soil to Egypt; if the river should fail, Egypt would revert, like the
land on either side of it, to a desert of sterile sand where the rain
never falls. The Egyptians are conscious of their debt to their
stream. A song in its honor runs as follows: "Greeting to thee, O
Nile, who hast revealed thyself throughout the land, who comest in
peace to give life to Egypt. Does it rise? The land is filled with
joy, every heart exults, every being receives its food, every mouth is
full. It brings bounties that are full of delight, it creates all good
things, it makes the grass to spring up for the beasts."
=Fertility of the Country.=--Egypt is truly an oasis in the midst of
the desert of Africa. It produces in abundance wheat, beans, lentils,
and all leguminous foods; palms rear themselves in forests. On the
pastures irrigated by the Nile graze herds of cattle and goats, and
flocks of geese. With a territory hardly equal to that of Belgium,
Egypt still supports 5,500,000 inhabitants. No country in Europe is so
thickly populated, and Egypt in antiquity was more densely thronged
than it is today.
=The Accounts of Herodotus.=--Egypt was better known to the Greeks
than the rest of the Orient. Herodotus had visited it in the fifth
century B.C. He describes in his History the inundations of the Nile,
the manners, costume, and religion of the people; he recounts events
of their history and tales which his guides had told him. Diodorus and
Strabo also speak of Egypt. But all had seen the country in its
decadence and had no knowledge of the ancient Egyptians.
=Champollion.=--The French expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) opened the
country to scholars. They made a close examination of the Pyramids
and ruins of Thebes, and collected drawings and inscriptions. But no
one could decipher the hieroglyphs, the Egyptian writing. It was an
erroneous impression that every sign in this writing must each
represent a word. In 1821 a French scholar, Champollion, experimented
with another system. An official had reported that there was an
inscription at Rosetta in three forms of writing--parallel with the
hieroglyphs was a translation in Greek. The name of King Ptolemy, was
surrounded with a cartouche.[8] Champollion succeeded in finding in
this name the letters P, T, O, L, M, I, S. Comparing these with other
names of kings similarly enclosed, he found the whole alphabet. He
then read the hieroglyphs and found that they were written in a
language like the Coptic, the language spoken in Egypt at the time of
the Romans, and which was already known to scholars.
=Egyptologists.=--Since Champollion, many scholars have travelled over
Egypt and have ransacked it thoroughly. We call these students
Egyptologists, and they are to be found in every country of Europe. A
French Egyptologist, Mariette (1821-1881), made some excavations for
the Viceroy of Egypt and created the museum of Boulak. France has
established in Cairo a school of Egyptology, directed by Maspero.
=Discoveries.=--Not every country yields such rich discoveries as does
Egypt. The Egyptians constructed their tombs like houses, and laid in
them objects of every kind for the use of the dead--furniture,
garments, arms, and edibles. The whole country was filled with tombs
similarly furnished. Under this extraordinarily dry climate everything
has been preserved; objects come to light intact after a burial of
4,000 or 5,000 years. No people of antiquity have left so many traces
of themselves as the Egyptians; none is better known to us.
THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE
=Antiquity of the Egyptian People.=--An Egyptian priest said to
Herodotus, "You Greeks are only children." The Egyptians considered
themselves the oldest people of the world. Down to the Persian
conquest (520[9] B.C.) there were twenty-six dynasties of kings. The
first ran back 4,000 years,[10] and during these forty centuries Egypt
had been an empire. The capital down to the tenth dynasty (the period
of the Old Empire) was at Memphis in Lower Egypt, later, in the New
Empire, at Thebes in Upper Egypt.
=Memphis and the Pyramids.=--Memphis, built by the first king of
Egypt, was protected by an enormous dike. The village has existed for
more than five thousand years; but since the thirteenth century the
inhabitants have taken the stones of its ruins to build the houses of
Cairo; what these people left the Nile recaptured. The Pyramids, not
far from Memphis, are contemporaneous with the old empire; they are
the tombs of three kings of the fourth dynasty. The greatest of the
pyramids, 480 feet high, required the labor of 100,000 men for thirty
years.[11] To raise the stones for it they built gradually ascending
platforms which were removed when the structure was completed.
=Egyptian Civilization.=--The statues, paintings, and instruments
which are taken from the tombs of this epoch give evidence of an
already civilized people. When all the other eminent nations of
antiquity--the Hindoos, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans--were still in
a savage state, 3,500 years before our era, the Egyptians had known
for a long time how to cultivate the soil, to weave cloths, to work
metals, to paint, sculpture, and to write; they had an organized
religion, a king, and an administration.
=Thebes.=--At the eleventh dynasty Thebes succeeds Memphis as capital.
The ruins of Thebes are still standing. They are marvellous, extending
as they do on both banks of the Nile, with a circuit of about seven
miles. On the left bank there is a series of palaces and temples which
lead to vast cemeteries. On the right bank two villages, Luxor and
Karnak, distant a half-hour one from the other, are built in the midst
of the ruins. They are united by a double row of sphinxes, which must
have once included more than 1,000 of these monuments. Among these
temples in ruins the greatest was the temple of Ammon at Karnak. It
was surrounded by a wall of over one and one-third miles in length;
the famous Hall of Columns, the greatest in the world, had a length
of 334 feet, a width of 174 feet,[12] and was supported by 134
columns; twelve of these are over 65 feet high. Thebes was for 1,500
years the capital and sacred city, the residence of kings and the
dwelling-place of the priests.
=The Pharaoh.=--The king of Egypt, called Pharaoh, was esteemed as the
son of the Sun-god and his incarnation on earth; divinity was ascribed
to him also. We may see in a picture King Rameses II standing in
adoration before the divine Rameses who is sitting between two gods.
The king as man adores himself as god. Being god, the Pharaoh has
absolute power over men; as master, he gives his orders to his great
nobles at court, to his warriors, to all his subjects. But the
priests, though adoring him, surround and watch him; their head, the
high priest of the god Ammon, at last becomes more powerful than the
king; he often governs under the name of the king and in his stead.
=The Subjects of Pharaoh.=--The king, the priests, the warriors, the
nobles, are proprietors of all Egypt; all the other people are simply
their peasants who cultivate the land for them. Scribes in the service
of the king watch them and collect the farm-dues, often with blows of
the staff. One of these functionaries writes as follows to a friend,
"Have you ever pictured to yourself the existence of the peasant who
tills the soil. The tax-collector is on the platform busily seizing
the tithe of the harvest. He has his men with him armed with staves,
his negroes provided with strips of palm. All cry, 'Come, give us
grain,' If the peasant hasn't it, they throw him full length on the
earth, bind him, draw him to the canal, and hurl him in head
foremost."
=Despotism.=--The Egyptian people has always been, and still is, gay,
careless, gentle, docile as an infant, always ready to submit to
tyranny. In this country the cudgel was the instrument of education
and of government. "The young man," said the scribes, "has a back to
be beaten; he hears when he is struck." "One day," says a French
traveller, "finding myself before the ruins of Thebes, I exclaimed,
'But how did they do all this?' My guide burst out laughing, touched
me on the arm and, showing me a palm, said to me, 'Here is what they
used to accomplish all this. You know, sir, with 100,000 branches of
palms split on the backs of those who always have their shoulders
bare, you can build many a palace and some temples to boot.'"
=Isolation of the Egyptians.=--The Egyptians moved but little beyond
their borders. As the sea inspired them with terror, they had no
commerce and did not trade with other peoples. They were not at all a
military nation. Their kings, it is true, often went on expeditions at
the head of mercenaries either against the negroes of Ethiopia or
against the tribes of Syria. They gained victories which they had
painted on the walls of their palaces, they brought back troops of
captives whom they used in building monuments; but they never made
great conquests. Foreigners came more to Egypt than Egyptians went
abroad.
=Religion of the Egyptians.=--"The Egyptians," said Herodotus, "are
the most religious of all men." We do not know any people so devout;
almost all their paintings represent men in prayer before a god;
almost all their manuscripts are religious books.
=Egyptian Gods.=--The principal deity is a Sun-god, creator,
beneficent, "who knows all things, who exists from the beginning."
This god has a divine wife and son. All the Egyptians adored this
trinity; but not all gave it the same name. Each region gave a
different name to these three gods. At Memphis they called the father
Phtah, the mother Sekhet, the son Imouthes; at Abydos they called them
Osiris, Isis, and Horus; at Thebes, Ammon, Mouth, and Chons. Then,
too, the people of one province adopted the gods of other provinces.
Further, they made other gods emanate from each god of the trinity.
Thus the number of gods was increased and religion was complicated.
=Osiris.=--These gods have their history; it is that of the sun; for
the sun appeared to the Egyptians, as to most of the primitive
peoples, the mightiest of beings, and consequently a god. Osiris, the
sun, is slain by Set, god of the night; Isis, the moon, his wife,
bewails and buries him; Horus, his son, the rising sun, avenges him by
killing his murderer.
=Ammon-ra.=--Ammon-ra, god of Thebes, is represented as traversing
heaven each day in a bark ("the good bark of millions of years"); the
shades of the dead propel it with long oars; the god stands at the
prow to strike the enemy with his lance. The hymn which they chanted
in his honor is as follows: "Homage to thee; thou watchest favoringly,
thou watchest truly, O master of the two horizons.... Thou treadest
the heavens on high, thine enemies are laid low. The heaven is glad,
the earth is joyful, the gods unite in festal cheer to render glory
to Ra when they see him rising in his bark after he has overwhelmed
his enemies. O Ra, give abounding life to Pharaoh, bestow bread for
his hunger (belly), water for his throat, perfumes for his hair."
=Animal-Headed Gods.=--The Egyptians often represented their gods with
human form, but more frequently under the form of a beast. Each god
has his animal: Phtah incarnates himself in the beetle, Horus in the
hawk, Osiris in the bull. The two figures often unite in a man with
the head of an animal or an animal with the head of a man. Every god
may be figured in four forms: Horus, for example, as a man, a hawk, as
man with the head of a hawk, as a hawk with the head of a man.
=Sacred Animals.=--What did the Egyptians wish to designate by this
symbol? One hardly knows. They, themselves, came to regard as sacred
the animals which served to represent the gods to them: the bull, the
beetle, the ibis, the hawk, the cat, the crocodile. They cared for
them and protected them. A century before the Christian era a Roman
citizen killed a cat at Alexandria; the people rose in riot, seized
him, and, notwithstanding the entreaties of the king, murdered him,
although at the same time they had great fear of the Romans. There was
in each temple a sacred animal which was adored. The traveller Strabo
records a visit to a sacred crocodile of Thebes: "The beast," said he,
"lay on the edge of a pond, the priests drew near, two of them opened
his mouth, a third thrust in cakes, grilled fish, and a drink made
with meal."
=The Bull Apis.=--Of these animal gods the most venerated was the bull
Apis. It represented at once Osiris and Phtah and lived at Memphis in
a chapel served by the priests. After its death it became an Osiris
(Osar-hapi), it was embalmed, and its mummy deposited in a vault. The
sepulchres of the "Osar-hapi" constituted a gigantic monument, the
Serapeum, discovered in 1851 by Marietta.
=Cult of the Dead.=--The Egyptians adored also the spirits of the
dead. They seem to have believed at first that every man had a
"double" (Ka), and that when the man was dead his double still
survived. Many savage peoples believe this to this day. The Egyptian
tomb in the time of the Old Empire was termed "House of the Double."
It was a low room arranged like a chamber, where for the service of
the double there were placed all that he required, chairs, tables,
beds, chests, linen, closets, garments, toilet utensils, weapons,
sometimes a war-chariot; for the entertainment of the double, statues,
paintings, books; for his sustenance, grain and foods. And then they
set there a double of the dead in the form of a statue in wood or
stone carved in his likeness. At last the opening to the vault was
sealed; the double was enclosed, but the living still provided for
him. They brought him foods or they might beseech a god that he supply
them to the spirit, as in this inscription, "An offering to Osiris
that he may confer on the Ka of the deceased N. bread, drink, meat,
geese, milk, wine, beer, clothing, perfumes--all good things and pure
on which the god (_i.e._ the Ka) subsists."
=Judgment of the Soul.=--Later, originating with the eleventh
dynasty, the Egyptians believed that the soul flew away from the body
and sought Osiris under the earth, the realm into which the sun seemed
every day to sink. There Osiris sits on his tribunal, surrounded by
forty-two judges; the soul appears before these to give account of his
past life. His actions are weighed in the balance of truth, his
"heart" is called to witness. "O heart," cries the dead, "O heart, the
issue of my mother, my heart when I was on earth, offer not thyself as
witness, charge me not before the great god." The soul found on
examination to be bad is tormented for centuries and at last
annihilated. The good soul springs up across the firmament; after many
tests it rejoins the company of the gods and is absorbed into them.
=Mummies.=--During this pilgrimage the soul may wish to re-enter the
body to rest there. The body must therefore be kept intact, and so the
Egyptians learned to embalm it. The corpse was filled with spices,
drenched in a bath of natron, wound with bandages and thus transformed
into a mummy. The mummy encased in a coffin of wood or plaster was
laid in the tomb with every provision necessary to its life.
=Book of the Dead.=--A book was deposited with the mummy, the Book of
the Dead, which explains what the soul ought to say in the other world
when it makes its defence before the tribunal of Osiris: "I have never
committed fraud; ... I have never vexed the widow; ... I have never
committed any forbidden act; ... I have never been an idler; ... I
have never taken the slave from his master; ... I never stole the
bread from the temples; ... I never removed the provisions or the
bandages of the dead; I never altered the grain measure; ... I never
hunted sacred beasts; I never caught sacred fish; ... I am pure; ... I
have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the
naked; I have sacrificed to the gods, and offered funeral feasts to
dead." Here we see Egyptian morality: observance of ceremonies,
respect for everything pertaining to the gods, sincerity, honesty, and
beneficence.
THE ARTS
=Industry.=--The Egyptians were the first to practice the arts
necessary to a civilized people. From the first dynasty, 3,000[13]
years B.C., paintings on the tomb exhibit men working, sowing,
harvesting, beating and winnowing grain; we have representations of
herds of cattle, sheep, geese, swine; of persons richly clothed,
processions, feasts where the harp is played--almost the same life
that we behold 3,000 years later. As early as this time the Egyptians
knew how to manipulate gold, silver, bronze; to manufacture arms and
jewels, glass, pottery, and enamel; they wove garments of linen and
wool, and cloths, transparent or embroidered with gold.
=Architecture.=--They were the oldest artists of the world. They
constructed enormous monuments which appear to be eternal, for down to
the present, time has not been able to destroy them. They never built,
as we do, for the living, but for the gods and for the dead, _i.e._,
temples and tombs. Only a slight amount of debris is left of their
houses, and even the palaces of their kings in comparison with the
tombs appear, in the language of the Greeks, to be only inns. The
house was to serve only for a lifetime, the tomb for eternity.
=Tombs.=--The Great Pyramid is a royal tomb. Ancient tombs ordinarily
had this form. In Lower Egypt there still remain pyramids arranged in
rows or scattered about, some larger, others smaller. These are the
tombs of kings and nobles. Later the tombs are constructed
underground, some under earth, others cut into the granite of the
hills. Each generation needs new ones, and therefore near the town of
living people is built the richer and greater city of the dead
(necropolis).
=Temples.=--The gods also required eternal and splendid habitations.
Their temples include a magnificent sanctuary, the dwelling of the
god, surrounded with courts, gardens, chambers where the priests
lodge, wardrobes for his jewels, utensils, and vestments. This
combination of edifices, the work of many generations, is encircled
with a wall. The temple of Ammon at Thebes had the labors of the kings
of all the dynasties from the twelfth to the last. Ordinarily in front
of the temple a great gate-way is erected, with inclined faces--the
pylone. On either side of the entrance is an obelisk, a needle of rock
with gilded point, or perhaps a colossus in stone representing a
sitting giant. Often the approach to the temple is by a long avenue
rimmed with sphinxes.
Pyramids, pylones, colossi, sphinxes, and obelisks characterize this
architecture. Everything is massive, compact, and, above all, immense.
Hence these monuments appear clumsy but indestructible.
=Sculpture.=--Egyptian sculptors began with imitating nature. The
oldest statues are impressive for their life and freshness, and are
doubtless portraits of the dead. Of this sort is the famous squatting
scribe of the Louvre.[14] But beginning with the eleventh dynasty the
sculptor is no longer free to represent the human body as he sees it,
but must follow conventional rules fixed by religion. And so all the
statues resemble one another--parallel legs, the feet joined, arms
crossed on the breast, the figure motionless; the statues are often
majestic, but always stiff and monotonous. Art has ceased to reproduce
nature and is become a conventional symbol.
=Painting.=--The Egyptians used very solid colors; after 5,000 years
they are still fresh and bright. But they were ignorant of coloring
designs; they knew neither tints, shadows, nor perspective. Painting,
like sculpture, was subject to religious rules and was therefore
monotonous. If fifty persons were to be represented, the artist made
them all alike.
=Literature.=--The literature of the Egyptians is found in the
tombs--not only books of medicine, of magic and of piety, but also
poems, letters, accounts of travels, and even romances.
=Destiny of the Egyptian Civilization.=--The Egyptians conserved their
customs, religion, and arts even after the fall of their empire.
Subjects of the Persians, then the Greeks, and at last of the Romans,
they kept their old usages, their hieroglyphics, their mummies and
sacred animals. At last between the third and second centuries A.D.,
Egyptian civilization was slowly extinguished.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Following the curves of the stream.--ED.
[7] In some localities, _e.g._ Thebes, the flood is even higher.--ED.
[8] An enclosing case.
[9] 525 B.C.--ED.
[10] The chronology of early Egyptian history is uncertain. Civilization
existed in this land much earlier than was formerly supposed.--ED.
[11] According to Petrie ("History of Egypt," New York, 1895, i., 40)
_twenty years_ were consumed.--ED.
[12] Perrot and Chipiez ("History of Ancient Egyptian Art," London.
1883, i., 365) give 340 feet by 170.--ED.
[13] Probably much earlier than this.--ED.
[14] The Louvre Museum in Paris has an excellent collection of Egyptian
subjects.